consider a javascript structure to house our widgets

[timelyportfolio]

In the case of multiple widgets, there will be multiple payload which could be confusing and also possibly cause conflicts. In addition a widget often will return an object that allows us to do things with it beyond the initial draw/build. As an example, I have changed getScript in my fork to something like this:

getScript <- function(x, file, package){
  payload = sprintf("var payload = %s\n", RJSONIO::toJSON(x))
  # simple check for url; probably more robust method out there
  if( grep("^http",file) ) {
    script_file <- file
  } else script_file <- system.file(file, package = package)
  lines <- readLines(script_file, warn = FALSE, encoding = "UTF-8")
  tags$script(
    HTML(
      sprintf(
"
var htmlWidgets = typeof(htmlWidgets) == 'undefined' ? [] : htmlWidgets;
htmlWidgets.push(
  (function(){
    %s
    %s
  })()
)
"
, paste0(payload,collapse="n")
, paste0(lines,collapse="\n")
      )
    )
  )
}

and then a {{widget}}.js that does something like this:

return {
  "widget" : new Spinner(payload.config).spin(document.getElementById(payload.id)),
  "payload" : payload,
  "type" : "spin"
};

To test it for yourself, you could

devtools::install_github("timelyportfolio/htmlwidgets")
source('http://timelyportfolio.github.io/htmlwidgets_spin/R/spin.R')
spin()

Would love thoughts.

[ramnathv]

This is an interesting idea. Let me sit on it over the weekend to give you useful feedback.

[timelyportfolio]

a simple example in case this is easier example.html . In this application, we might want to

htmlWidgets[0].widget.stop()

once something is completed.

[ramnathv]

That makes a lot of sense. Good thinking @timelyportfolio !

[timelyportfolio]

explore this in this line

[timelyportfolio]

is this something that might happen or should I abandon hope?

[ramnathv]

@timelyportfolio This is definitely something that will have to be implemented as we make the widgets more extensible with javascript. However, I believe this is something we should do after the widget API has stabilized and we have tested it across several widgets.

[ramnathv]

Closing this as I have opened a new issue #19 with a more concise description of the objectives. Thanks for bringing this up.